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Talk:Nemesis/@comment-35434444-20190313210814
The solution to the riddle of identity is in the word: an identity is an idea. What Theseus' ship is depends entirely on how you, the subjective observer/thinker, want to discern the situation. If you decide that the criterion for being Thesues' ship is something consistent with the pshysical characteristics of the ship Theseus sailed in, then both the original and the copy are authentic. There being two need not present a contradiction if you consider then as mutually interdependant phenomenon: you wouldn't be refering to one boat as the original if there were no copy and the copy wouldn't be a copy if there was no original. Therefore the two arise in subjective awareness at the same time. The copy is simply an "outgrowth" of the original in the same way that tree branches grow out of trunks and babies grow out of mothers. If Thesues ship has to be the one Thesues physically planted his ass on, only the original can be considered the real thing and the other is just a copy. But if we're going to allow that the ship has been meddled with by the elements and is therefore no longer authentic, then doesn't it stand to reason that the boat was more authentic in the initial stages of rot and restoration than towards the end? If so then wouldn't the ship have been less "Theseus' ship" the instant he stepped onto shore and left it behind him? Wouldn't it be different, however imperceptibly, than it was in the state of having Thesus on board? Therefore the ship as it was in the moment it was being rowed by Thesus is not consistent with the ship fifteen minutes after it was left behind. Were it possible to save the ships exact atomic configuration of the ship as it was in these two instants and assemble them them in the present alongside the restoration, would we arrive at a dupilication of this same conundrum? If some moments of the ships history make it more authetically "Theseus' ship" than others, then couldn't you pull a Zeno's paradox and generate an infinite continum of copies and yet never arrive that the exact moment that Theseus' ship was actually Theseus ship just in the same way that you can talk about an athlete racing a tortoise in such a way that he never overtakes it? What we find then is that "Thesues' ship" is little more than a pattern of thought and we define the original as being authetic as a matter of convention just because we're used to defining it that way, when really, if you take the situauation apart, the line we draw doesn't make any underlying sense. It is because it has always been and it has always been because it is. What this all means for Chase is that being a copy isn't somthing that needs to worry him because even as a copy he is just as authentic as the original. An authentic copy in the same way that a child is an authentic expression of it's parents: you wouldn't say that you were fake and your mother was real just because she had thouse blue eyes before you did, would you? If Chase is fake, fine -- he's fake. But that doesn't change his memories. It doesn't change the way his friends feel about him. It doesn't change his situation as a soldier. His convictions. His virtues. His faults. Experientially speaking, everything that happend to the original before the transfer happend to him as well. And as we've just explored, it is the subjective observer who decides how the facts of the world break down; what they mean. He isn't just Julian Chase because he sayes he is. He knows he is. Knows it in a way that cannot be expressed. In whatever passes for a soul in a world where consciousness can be devided from the brain. Experientially. Nemesis was simply another branch on the same tree.